I have opined here on various occasions on the subject of Football Fascism, the strange way that collectivist politicians lose their minds and start meddling in private activity and private property just because it involves kicking a ball.
Now we see something new: a football manager who has claimed to be an actual fascist.
Wow.
What to make of that insane extremism?
It turns out that Mr De Canio is in very fine company when finding good things to say about Mr Mussolini and his muscular approach to running a country. Over at The Commentator:
Mussolini hailed from an explicitly socialist-populist tradition but in classic New Labour style identified a ‘third way’ between the angry revolutionary masses and big business: huge state-run corporations to control Italy’s economic life. This and his muscular demands for discipline and sacrifice - and above all his noisy popularity - created a political formula in which everyone could find something to admire.
Thus Mahatma Gandhi: “one of the great statesmen of our time”. Or US President Franklin D Roosevelt: “I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman”.
Here in the UK H G Wells, the towering hero of 1930s progressive thought, in 1932 used the elite occasion of the Young Liberals summer school in Oxford to make an unusually explicit appeal: “I am asking for a Liberal Fascism.” Wells argued that the way ahead lay in turning to a new form of communism: “We shall have to turn - we outsiders, that is, the young people with foresight for enlightened Nazis”. A year later Winston Churchill gushed about Mussolini as he saw him as a bastion against bestial Bolshevism: “the Roman genius…the greatest lawgiver among living men.”
With such giddy praise ringing in his ears, what could go wrong for Mussolini? Everything...
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So next time Di Canio is asked about his political opinions, maybe he should meekly reply that he is only following in the tradition of some of the most famous political and intellectual leaders the world has ever seen.
Meanwhile cynics might see plenty of similarities between the modern football enterprise and 1930s machine-age mass iconography. The impossible color and swirl of night games. The teams in bright uniforms marching out to do battle before vast choreographed crowds that roar as a single mindless organism. Bland corporate titan owners perched high in the best seats well protected from the braying masses. Leadership cults. Medals. Heroic striving. Bombast. Lithe kitschy male athleticism – and flashes of brutish violence.
Thought and Reason, subordinated to Form and Emotion.
We mere individuals must be grateful that these days such extraordinarily potent if not dangerous tendencies play themselves out not in machine-age war, but by all of us watching people kicking a ball to and fro. Above all Gareth Bale.
Forward.
Did I mention Gareth Bale?
